Lakeside Hotel

1933-1978 (approximate)

In the 20th century, the area around the Newberry Mansion was becoming a less desirable residential neighborhood, as wealthy families moved east to Lake Shore Drive and what was later called the “Gold Coast” or north along Sheridan Road. Rooming houses began to pop up all around it – in fact, Near North was the city’s most extensive rooming house district. These lodging houses brought into the neighborhood a population of lower economic status, along with many transient and foreign people. [1] In their heyday, rooming houses were mainly filled with young people working as department store clerks, secretaries, salesmen or in journeyman construction building trades. They were booming with war workers during the two World Wars, but after 1945, when this work went away or moved to the edges of the city, the lodging house areas became more like skid rows, where you would find “large numbers of down-and-out men incorrectly assumed to be transients.” [2] 

Already by 1929, Clark Street, just one block over from the Newberry Mansion, was known as a “street of bright lights and vice” [3] – and the seedy atmosphere remained and expanded in coming decades. Dubbed “Towertown” after the nearby Water Tower, the Near North started to take on a bohemian character, centered in the Dill Pickle Club, operating just a block north of the Newberry Mansion.

In these surroundings, the new Lakeside Hotel fit right in. The photo on this page shows the hotel, which had been painted black sometime between 1959 and 1962. The building had 90 rooms stretching over its approximately 15,000 square feet.

Short- and long-term stays

The first ad for the hotel our research uncovered was in 1933, and advertised room and board, nicely fitted rooms and American and German cooking. The ads first included pricing in 1949 – referring to the Lakeside as “an outstanding small hotel” with large, clean and comfortable rooms and prices from $1.50 per day or $11.50 per week and up. Students were offered special rates of $10 per week for a single and $13 and up for a double.

In 1950, the daily price went up to $2. The rooms were advertised as completely furnished, including linens and dishes, and suitable for one, two or three adults. By 1955, the hotel was refurbished – the old chairs, lamps and tables were even advertised “for sale cheap” – into “charming efficiency apts.” Prices rose to $2.50 a day or $9 a week for rooms and $16 and upwards for one to two-and-a-half room apartments with wall-to-wall carpeting, free gas, light, linens, louvered windows, daily maid service and 24-hour desk service. One ad stated that the hotel had fine clientele and was clean, cool and comfortable – but there were no extras. 

1960s ads targeted guests with “discriminating taste,” and promised courtesy, cleanliness and comfort. Prices were $17 per week and up.

By the 1970s, prices had risen to $22 per week and above. The hotel targeted students and senior citizens with its low monthly rates, daily maid, TV, refrigerators and “clean and warm” environment. 

(All ads referred to above were from the Chicago Tribune.)

Hiring hotel staff

Employees were constantly needed for the small hotel, and there are countless ads to be found in the Chicago Tribune for desk clerks, maintenance men, maids and porters over the years. In 1936, a maintenance man earned $55 per month. Early ads for maids stressed good pay, no work on Sundays or holidays and even paid vacation. In 1946, the salary for maids was $100 per month. 

In 1946, the hotel sought to attract students in the area with an ad for a part-time relief clerk job with “easy hours and time to study.” A desk clerk in 1953 earned $200; one ad said a middle-aged man was preferred, and another a “good man able to meet people.” 

In 1965, they were looking for an “alert, active man” as an evening desk clerk – a hint that the environment in and around the hotel was challenging. By 1973, the hotel sought a “conscientious” and “alert” security watchman, and a desk clerk role the next year asked for someone energetic and able to “perform security duties and deal with people.” Running the front desk at the Lakeside Hotel was not a job for the sleepy or the weak.

The dark side of the Lakeside

While the ads for rooms painted a sunnier picture, newspaper stories from the time – full of robberies, suicides, murders and fires – reflected the increasingly rough character of the neighborhood.

A “fast moving gang of bandits” went on a robbery spree one morning in October of 1941. They committed five crimes, three of them at hotels on the north side – including the Lakeside Hotel, from which they were reported to have stolen $25. But in the end, they were caught by Hudson Avenue police. [4] 

As WWII raged, a sad story hit the pages of the Daily Times when a Treasury Department employee “whose last fear was that he would be buried without his teeth” plunged to his death from a sixth-floor window in the Lakeside Hotel in 1944. Philip Gibson Cochran, unmarried and 51 years old, worked in the savings bond examiner’s office in the Merchandise Mart. His farewell note stated he had “lots of bills to pay” and an improvised will left behind in his room earmarked $1200 and $275 in war bonds to “The Catholic church and the Pope.” [5] A follow up article in the Chicago Tribune points to an illness (which may have involved ulcers that affected his teeth) as prompting his desperate act. [6]

The stories of William Locklin and Malcolm Little, Jr. hint at the type of guests who stayed at the Lakeside Hotel. Locklin was sought by the FBI for a year-and-a-half, before being finally caught in November of 1962 as a result of a citizen’s tip, and agents found more than 1,000 pieces of counterfeit money in a suitcase in his room at the Lakeside. Apparently, the phony money surprised the agents, who were seeking Locklin for different crimes: taking $16000 in forged money orders out of Texas and driving a stolen vehicle from Kansas to Arkansas. [7]

Little, Jr., who also lived at the Lakeside Hotel, was arrested with a co-conspirator from the nearby Y.M.C.A. hotel in 1969. The two had allegedly kidnapped a 25-year-old nurse and forcing her to drive at knifepoint. The quick-thinking nurse deliberately drove into a parked car and the two men were caught by the police. [8]

In 1973, two fires took place at the Lakeside within two weeks of each other. The first fire started near a stairwell or elevator on the fourth floor of the building and burned up to the sixth floor. Sidney Green, aged 74, died in the blaze and a 31-year-old fireman and two other residents, aged 78 and 83, suffered smoke inhalation. Firemen entered the building through the roof to try to rescue Green. The fire caused $20,000 damage and badly damaged 15 one-room apartments. [9] Less than two weeks later, a second fire caused another $5000 damage, and 40 people were evacuated. The fire started in a room on the vacant top floor of the building. [10] 

This wasn’t the last fire to hit the Lakeside Hotel. In 1978, another fire was started by a cigarette smoldering in a mattress in a third-floor room, while the occupant was away from his room. Around 40 people were evacuated again this time, and the fire caused another $5,000 damage. [11]

Another resident of the Lakeside Hotel met a tragic end when Buxton L. Johnson, heir to $250,000 to $300,000 in trust funds ($1.7-$2 million in 2026 dollars) was murdered in April of 1974. Johson had been arrested several times in recent years, including for disorderly conduct in a tavern shortly before his death. According to the article, he had been living off the $600 a month interest from his trust fund in a one-room apartment in the Lakeside Hotel for the past one-and-a-half years – though police found almost no personal possessions and few clothes when they searched his room. A Navy veteran and once part of wealthy society, he had become a “drifter and loner” in the late 1960s. Johnson’s body was found in a lot south of the Sandburg Village complex, and he was apparently bludgeoned to death with a rock. Police believed that robbery may have been the motive. [12]

And finally, the story of Charles F. Hunter, who was pushed to his death out of a third-floor window in the Lakeside Hotel after being robbed. Hunter, 62, had once been chairman of Northwestern University’s radio-television-film department. His killers were sentenced to at least 14 years each for the murder. Our neighbor recalls the event to this day. [13]

Random connection with The Smiths 

When The Smiths released their first single, Hand in Glove, the cover controversially pictured a naked man shown from behind. There has long been speculation about the identify of both the model and the photographer. 

One story says that in 1959, photographer Chuck Renslow met George O’Mara at Oak Street Beach; George lived at the Lakeside Hotel and worked for moving company Pickens Cane. Chuck said he was “a very nice, wonderful person, nice personality”. He photographed him for six to eight months. Later another photographer, Jim French, is thought to have taken a photo of O’Mara for The Nude Male – A new perspective that was used (possibly without permission?) for the Hand in Glove cover. If you look at the photos by both photographers, they certainly look like the same person. [14] 

Another source agrees that the model was likely O’Mara but states that photographer Lou Thomas took the photo. [15]

Another end has come – and a new beginning

A court case, Bocchetta v. McCourt, decided June 6, 1983, describes a deal for Vittore Bocchetta to purchase 833-839 North Dearborn Street from James McCourt for $320,000. McCourt was the owner of a real estate management company and operated residential hotels for more than 50 years until retiring in 1969. In 1978, McCourt properties Inc. was recorded as being located at 839 N Dearborn. 

Possession of the building was to be delivered to Bocchetta on February 28, 1978, after a series of payments. Bocchetta made the initial payment but failed to come up with the following sums owed, so, according to the suit, which sought to recover the initial payment, McCourt sold the property to someone else, who is unnamed in the suit. 

Cook County Clerk’s Office records show that on April 14, 1978, James McCourt sold 833-839 North Dearborn to Lowell D Wohlfiel for $260,000.

It was ready for its most recent transformation.

[1] The Gold Coast and the Slum, page 36

[2] http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1065.html

[3] The Gold Coast and the Slum, page 44

[4] Chicago Tribune, 19 October 1941, page 19

[5] Daily Times, 3 February 1944, page 46

[6] Chicago Tribune, 4 February 1944, Page 8

[7] Chicago Tribune, 16 Nov 1962, Page 2

[8] Chicago Tribune, 8 Apr 1969, Page 2

[9] Chicago Tribune, 29 January 1973, page 18

[10] Chicago Tribune, 11 February 1973, page 94

[11] Chicago Tribune, 3 April 1978, page 14

[12] Chicago Tribune, 19 April 1974, page 22 and Chicago Tribune, 18 April 1974, page 23

[13] The Daily Herald, 2 August 1977, Page 4

[14] https://www.morrissey-solo.com/archive/03/05/13/0651259.shtml]. 

[15] Goddard, Simon (2013). Songs That Saved Your Life (Revised Edition): The Art of The Smiths 1982-87. United Kingdom: Titan. ISBN 9781781162590]